Oscillating somewhere between the seminal vision of H.G. Wells and the nut-frying time machine imagined in Napoleon Dynamite, Richie Mehta’s biggest feature to date unwinds erratically, circling familiar points of science-fiction as it attempts to re-visit the glory days of M. Night Shyamalan’s career.

A father-and-son story wrapped inside a time-machine device, I’ll Follow You Down opens with Gabe (Rufus Sewell) saying goodbye to his son Erol (John Paul Ruttan) as he heads off for a business trip.

Erol asks him about the pocket watch he’s carrying, and before you can say “foreshadowing,” Gabe disappears into what seems to be thin air. His loyal wife Marika (Gillian Anderson) is despondent. So is Erol.

Flash forward several years. Erol is now a college-age genius played by Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense), but mom is still battling chronic depression and suicidal tendencies.

Erol wants to help his mother. He also wants to understand what happened to his father, and when he learns about the time-travelling research he was conducting, he tumbles down the very same rabbit hole.

Dad may have skipped back into the past in order to meet Albert Einstein. He would have returned, too, but fate intervened — leaving nothing but the pocket watch behind as a lure for young Erol.

Now, we all love the idea of time travel because it allows for life ‘do-overs.’ Every one of us has made errors of judgment that we’d like to correct, and this urge to go back as karma repairman soon powers this whole awkward, and highly unbelievable, movie machine.

Usually, we can suspend disbelief in these situations for two reasons: the production values are so good we buy into the technological angle (Edge of Tomorrow) or else the script is so compelling we’re pinned to the human drama (Looper).

Mehta’s movie doesn’t really work on either score. The movie feels stunted by budgetary constraints and Mehta has a hard time making the shots work. For instance, it’s obvious we are not in an airport for some pivotal scenes, a fact Mehta tries to overcome by showing us a sheet of plywood and some “we are working to serve you better” signage. It works about as well as the pocket-watch device, as does everything in this weird head-on collision between science-fiction cliché and father-son formula.

The movie feels stunted by budgetary constraints and Mehta has a hard time making the shots work

We can feel Mehta’s ambition to go big, but after a solid run of singles and art-house portraits of invisible people (Amal, Siddharth), this big leap stumbles because there’s no calibration to the emotional movement of the larger piece.

Everything feels out of sync, from Gillian Anderson’s frustratingly dreary onscreen persona to Rufus Sewell’s complete lack of empathy. The only thing that does tick is Osment, the former child star who saw dead people, and now ramps up for a career resurrection in a role that relies on the same beats.

The actor has a gift for selling awkward exposition to the audience and comes close to making us believe in the nonsensical mathematical equations presented on screen. He’s sympathetic and solid, but he can’t pull it off completely because he’s not getting any visual help from Mehta’s script or direction.

Osment does a reasonable job pulling all the emotional arcs into focus and giving this movie some spring-wound tension, but like the symbolic time piece in the movie, it’s little more than a delicate collection of broken cogs and gears that can’t tell us anything, not even the time.